bad disk discovery

[prateek sethi]

Hi ,

Is there any way or tool to find out that a disk which is not responding
properly is really bad or not? Sometimes I have seen that there is lot of
CDB error for a drive and system reboot makes every thing fine. What can be
reasons for such kind of scenarios?

I know smartctl is the one which can help. I have some couple of question
regarding this .

1. What if disk does not support smartctl?
2. How I can do smartest use of smartctl command like which parameters can
tell that the disk is actually bad?
3. What other test I can perform to make it sure that disk has completely
gone?


Please tell me correct place to ask this question if I am asking at wrong
place.